What’s the song of your summer?
It’s the first week of school and the kids are pissed. And so am I. This was possibly one of the best summers I’ve had as a mother (and that is saying something). I had individual trips with each of my sons, lots of our friends visited, we spent time with family, went to really beautiful weddings, climbed new mountains and collected rocks and played hearts and developed a cache of inside jokes. I even had a one-on-one trip with my mother, which fortified me and enriched my own mothering.
My younger son and I developed a strategy for toll booths: I pull up to the window, ask how much. Then I say, “You’ll have to talk to my accountant” and pull the car up a foot and he rolls his window down and pays the toll. It cracked us up, and as a bonus, it mortified my older son (why is he embarrassed in front of the toll booth lady? She doesn’t go to his school). When we finally got an ez pass, we mourned the loss of this ritual. The excellent thing about this phase of mothering is that they’ll remember this stuff, which is special because so many of my really delightful memories with them exist pretty much in only my head and maybe in the folklore of our family.
But summer comes to an end. Every summer, there’s a song. I remember so clearly the summer of “Fantasy” with ODB and Mariah Carey. It meant one thing to me, and means something else to everyone else, listening to the radio and smoking things out of apples (theoretically, Ma, that’s a metaphor, of course).
Cruising with the Beach Boys
So strange to hear that song again tonight
Traveling on business in a rented car
Miles from anywhere I’ve been before.
And now a tune I haven’t heard for years
Probably not since it last left the charts
Back in L.A. in 1969.
I can’t believe I know the words by heart
And can’t think of a girl to blame them on.
Every lovesick summer has its song,
And this one I pretended to despise,
But if I was alone when it came on,
I turned it up full-blast to sing along —
A primal scream in croaky baritone,
The notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred.
No wonder I spent so much time alone
Making the rounds in Dad’s old Thunderbird.
Some nights I drove down to the beach to park
And walk along the railings of the pier.
The water down below was cold and dark,
The waves monotonous against the shore.
The darkness and the mist, the midnight sea,
The flickering lights reflected from the city —
A perfect setting for a boy like me,
The Cecil B. DeMille of my self-pity.
I thought by now I’d left those nights behind,
Lost like the girls that I could never get,
Gone with the years, junked with the old T-Bird.
But one old song, a stretch of empty road,
Can open up a door and let them fall
Tumbling like boxes from a dusty shelf,
Tightening my throat for no reason at all,
Bringing on tears shed only for myself.
Write about this summer, or about another summer when you were so moved by the worst song, the most embarrassing catchy nonsense song you couldn’t help belting. This summer, the song we were always so happy to hear on the radio was “Cheap Thrills” by Sia. Below is my free write about that. I wrote it by hand in my notebook during a group, and in the retyping, things started to get more focused. I’ll keep working on it, but here it is.
He reads me an article about pandas bred in captivity to be released into the wild, prepared for what may come with stuffed leopards and humans dressed as adults.
So often I feel just dressed as an adult, preparing them for a world I haven’t quite figured out.Outside trees speed by, the highway steaming ahead of us in the sunlight, in the just rained or the about to rain.
They are already on their own paths, spending days and nights in the wild of their own friendships and minds. This song means something different to my son, who perhaps is feeling the early sweaty-palm gut-wrenching longing for some girl whose name he’ll remember fondly in 20 years, when some other girl, with a completely different memory of 2016 will have won–or broken–his heart. Summers come to an end.
The earth tips toward the sun, risks a move toward that which pulls it, that dangerous object which burns. Nearly surrendering and then righting itself to continue swimming its wide circles through the dark, some things unknown and others predictable, reliable, glorious, and fleeting.
They come back.
I keep thinking of this when I prepare myself for their going.
A poem I wrote to a prompt that I’ve shared here, and in workshops in far away and exotic locales such as Minnesota just went live in The California Journal of Poetics. I really like the art they paired it with, and I’m pretty stoked to have it up. Read “Permission” here.
sometimes when you miss someone the only thing to do is photoshop them in, let them bring their dinner along
3 Responses
‘I’ve got that sunshine in my pocket and some good soul in my feet’, waves of joyfulness overtake everyone, nothing is wrong right now, everything is right. The actual words of the song, mish-mashed by juvenile interpreters, doesn’t matter. It is the happiness of it all; the beat that synchs with our heart, the baseline bobbing our heads like a dash board doll, and the words that touch our soul. Songs of summer, soundtracks of our lives, stick with us as our happiness is imprinted deep, context skewed to represent that moment in time, when we felt free.
“bobbing our heads like a dash board doll…” Can totally see this. And the idea of happiness imprinted deep inside by the music–it’s one of the most important things to give our kids (and ourselves). Hope you’re all having a spectacular weekend.
This one spoke to me. Takes me a minute sometimes to get it out. You know me…it takes a lot for me to feel like any of my writing is worth it.